>From: John Pelan <johnp@am.qub.ac.uk>
>
>On Wed, 19 Nov 1997, maximum entropy wrote:
>
>> OK, I finally managed to install a single-disk system from scratch.
>> The key points are that you must boot with a root in a swap partition,
>> and when partitioning the disk in sysinst you must MANUALLY change
>> sysinst's partition table so that the b partition is in exactly the
>> same place, and exactly the same size (doing this seems to require
>> specifying sizes and offsets in blocks.)
>
>Err, maybe I'm naive but if you are going to get the machine into a state
>where it is possible to do a 'dd' then why not cut out that middle stage ?
>i.e. just netboot, disklabel, make the filesystem(s), mount, and untar the
>     binary sets etc.

There are other ways to drop a diskimage onto a hard disk besides
netbooting.  I mentioned netbooting because that's what I used in my
testing, but one could theoretically write a filesystem onto a disk
under some other OS on different hardware, stick the disk into a pmax,
and continue from that point.

Cheers,
entropy

--
entropy -- it's not just a good idea, it's the second law.